Tag: symbolic link

Fix Revit Links “Not Found” after the Migration from BIM 360 Docs to Autodesk Docs

Luke Johnson

When a recent update to Autodesk Desktop Connector forced a migration to Autodesk Docs, file paths were generally change like this:

FROM – C:\Users\USERNAME\BIM 360\YOURFOLDERS

TO – C:\Users\USERNAME\ACCDocs\YOURFOLDERS

 

If you were doing some interesting tricks with BIM 360 Docs, and sharing and federating Revit models as non-initiated files on BIM 360, you may find that links were broken and “Not Found” in Manage Links after that latest Desktop Connector installation.

 

But don’t worry! You can just set a symbolic link to point from the old BIM 360 Docs location, to the new location. The Command Prompt script looks like this:

if exist "C:\Users\%USERNAME%\BIM 360" rename "C:\Users\%USERNAME%\BIM 360" BIM360.old
mklink /d "C:\Users\%USERNAME%\BIM 360" C:\Users\%USERNAME%\ACCDocs
Run these commands to fix links Not Found

The moment after this script was run, I was able to hit Reload from Manage Links in Revit and the new location was detected and links were loaded successfully. Note that they still appear in Revit as if they are in the old location, but really it is reading the latest data from Autodesk Docs, and that new location is being updated by Autodesk Desktop Connector.

Related Note:

I had already setup a symbolic link to move my BIM 360 Revit Cache folder to a secondary hard drive.

At this stage it appears those links are still working, as the Revit CollaborationCache is a different technology to the simple file sharing mechanism of Autodesk Docs.

How To Move Tekla BIMsight Storage Folder Location

Luke Johnson

If you view a lot of IFC files in Tekla BIMsight, you may find that the cache or storage folder fills up quite quickly. If this is in its default location of \%localappdata%\Tekla\Tekla BIMsight\ then you could use up valuable space on your SSD.

We can easily move this folder using symbolic links. In the script below, we:

  • check the default directory exists, and if so rename it
  • make a symbolic link to a new target directory, in this case I have used E:\TeklaBimSight
  • make the new directory if necessary
  • copy existing contents to the new directory

To use the script:

  1. Close Tekla BIMsight
  2. Copy text from the script into Notepad and save as CMD. Modify the target directory to your preference
  3. Save the script with CMD extension
  4. Right click and Run As Administrator
  5. Open BIMsight and confirm all is working ok
  6. Optional: delete the bimsight.old directory to cleanup
if exist "%localappdata%\Tekla\Tekla BIMsight" rename "%localappdata%\Tekla\Tekla BIMsight" bimsight.old
mklink /d "%localappdata%\Tekla\Tekla BIMsight" E:\TeklaBimSight
if not exist E:\TeklaBimSight MD E:\TeklaBimSight
robocopy /mir %localappdata%\Teklabimsight.old E:\TeklaBimSight\

BIMSIGHT.png